Overview

Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies — turning an ordinary person into a successful entrepreneur

A very natural question runs through the whole study of entrepreneurship: are entrepreneurs born, or can they be made? For a long time people believed that a successful entrepreneur was simply born with some rare, mysterious quality that ordinary people could never acquire. Modern research has shown that this belief is largely mistaken. What actually separates successful entrepreneurs from unsuccessful ones is not a magic personality trait but a definite set of competencies — knowledge, skills, motives and behaviours — and the encouraging truth is that most of these competencies can be learned, sharpened and developed through proper training. This chapter builds directly on that finding, because it explains both what those competencies are and how a person can be systematically helped to acquire them.

The chapter moves through four connected ideas, in the order you meet them here. First, it explains what an entrepreneurial competency actually means and describes the major competencies that research has repeatedly found in successful entrepreneurs, grouped into a small number of clusters that are easy to remember. Second, it sets out the need for developing these competencies — why deliberate development matters both for the individual entrepreneur and for the wider economy, and why competencies cannot simply be left to develop on their own. Third, it introduces the Entrepreneurship Development Programme (EDP) — its meaning, the needs that make such programmes necessary, and their objectives — the organised, planned way in which competencies are actually built up in real learners. Finally, it surveys the major institutions that conduct EDPs in India, from national bodies such as NIESBUD, EDII and NSIC down to the state and district-level agencies that reach entrepreneurs on the ground.

The ideas in this chapter are not the invention of any one board or textbook. The finding that entrepreneurial competencies can be developed, the standard clusters of competencies, and the design of entrepreneurship development programmes come from decades of research and practical training experience that is applied in the same way across the country and, indeed, in many other economies. What is specific to your Odisha CHSE Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship syllabus is the exact selection of these topics into this chapter and the Std-11 depth at which you are expected to explain each one in the examination, which is precisely what the sections below develop in order.